Imagine a substance the size of the last word of this sentence having the ability to kill you.

And imagine a substance whose appeal is so strong that the risk of death seems worth it.

Three local fentanyl addiction survivors, Courtney Strickland, Lindsey Blue, and MJ Hughes, said a friend overdosing was a call to action — not for them to stop using, but to find the dealer who sold the drugs that caused the overdose.

“You’re excited when someone overdosed,” Blue said. “When you know this person got high and almost died, you’re like, that bag is worth it and is going to last me a long time. I’d see someone fall out and be like, ‘Oh my god, are you OK?’ I’d be calling 911 but looking for their stuff.

“You kind of lose that moral standpoint of yourself because you don’t know where your next fix is going to be.”

Fentanyl caused Strickland, Blue, and Hughes to lose more than their moral compass. They lost themselves.

“It got to a point where my body depended on it,” Strickland said. “I couldn’t get up and physically do anything.”

All three women said their lives eventually revolved around getting high.

Even drug users not seeking out fentanyl will almost certainly get it. Other illicit drugs like heroin, cocaine, and even marijuana can be cut or laced with fentanyl to increase their potency.

“I don’t think there really was that much heroin, it was fentanyl. We called it heroin, but it was fentanyl,” Strickland said. “(Dealers) are cutting it with fentanyl because it’s so strong.”

Strickland said she was helping another woman through detox who said she only used heroin. Strickland had to deliver the bad news:

“I said, ‘No, baby, you’re doing fentanyl. There’s fentanyl in all heroin.’”

How it began

All three women took the same path to fentanyl addiction.

After each had car accidents, their doctors prescribed them opiates for pain management.

“I had a car wreck, my first one. When I got out of the hospital, the doctor was prescribing me a lot of pills,” Hughes said. “I could pretty much go get pills anytime until one day he said, ‘I can’t give you any more.’

“By this point, I was physically addicted.”

Each said they had tried drugs in their youth and knew they liked opiates. They said it can be easy for young people, especially living with parents, to find pills.

“You can get them from your parents’ medicine cabinet,” Hughes said.

Strickland said she found pills in her childhood home and began trying them, eventually learning she liked how they made her feel. After her car wreck, she was quickly hooked on the pills she was prescribed.

“I got prescribed Xanax and pain pills, and I loved them,” she said.

When their doctors cut them off, they began shopping for doctors who would prescribe opiates.

“I had an elderly doctor. He was old and just wanted to know if you’d taken your vitamins and read your Bible,” Hughes said. “You go to different doctors, and you figure out which ones are easier to manipulate.”

Blue said she and her friends would stagger their visits to a corrupt doctor, sharing pills and sharing the mounting cost.

“You have so much money lined up on the next prescription,” Blue said. “You’re hundreds of dollars in the hole, and by the time you pull out of the pharmacy, you have five little pills left because you owe everybody.”

Financial reality eventually set in, making each woman consider alternate methods of supplying their addiction.

“I always said I’d never do heroin because I’d love it too much,” Strickland said.

And she was right.

After running out of pain pills, she was beginning to feel withdrawal symptoms, also called being “sick.” Looking for any option to escape withdrawals, she was offered a stronger alternative: heroin.

“I did the heroin, and I loved it. It was cheaper, and I wasn’t going to be sick,” she said.

After running out of her pain pills, Hughes began using pressed street pills that contained fentanyl, then heroin.

“The sickness would always kick in,” Blue said. “You’d run out of pills and then use on the street. Then you couldn’t get back into the doctor anymore, and eventually it was cheaper to use heroin.

“I don’t think I started out like, ‘I’m going to be a fentanyl user.’ It just progressed to that.”

How it got worse

After each woman began using heroin, they soon realized they were also using fentanyl.

“There’s no ingredients on the back of the bag,” Blue said.

“Your want to not be sick is bad enough to not care what it is,” Hughes said. “You start finding out there’s fentanyl in (heroin), and you don’t know what you’re getting anymore. Some of (the dealers) would be considerate and be like, ‘There’s fentanyl in that so you might want to be careful with it,’ then you have other ones who’d just give it to you.”

But as fentanyl began rising in popularity — or notoriety — users began seeking it out.

“When (dealers) started cutting heroin with fentanyl, that’s what everybody wanted because it’s stronger,” Strickland said. “You don’t have to have that much of it, and you can make more money off it. A little bit goes a long way.”

The transition from comparatively slow-acting pills to the fast high from injecting the drugs was appealing.

“It’s like walking to work every day then realizing you could drive to work every day,” Blue said. “It’s like, ‘I’m going to walk today!’ No, you’re not.”

Strickland had the same experience.

“After shooting up, there was no other way for me. I didn’t want it any other way,” Strickland said.

For some, the repeated injections would weaken the veins. Hughes and Strickland said they would sometimes inject into their necks because they couldn’t find veins in their arms.

“You’d sit for 45 minutes just trying to find a dang vein,” Hughes said. “I still wanted to shoot up, I just didn’t have any veins.”

And finding the drugs was easy. They said drugs are more available than most people realize.

“If you don’t know a dealer yourself, you know someone who does know one,” Strickland said.

In many cases, friends use the same drugs and same dealers.

“A lot of times when you were with your associates — I don’t even want to call them friends anymore — you’d always ask where you got your heroin from,” Hughes said.

So when friends overdose, users often know the dealer who supplied the strong drugs and gravitate to that dealer.

Pamela Bolding, director of the Neighborhood Christian Center, said the people in recovery she meets have told her about their reaction when someone in their circle overdosed.

“It must be some pure stuff,” she said. “Even though it might cost them their life, they’ll try to go to that (dealer) to buy it, and (the dealer’s) business goes up when someone passes away.”

Bolding said she knew about 17 people who died from fentanyl overdoses in the past three months.

Strickland said, “It’s very sick and very sad. You didn’t know which of your friends was going to make it. You didn’t know which of your friends was going to die. It happened all the time.”

She said she got so used to having to resuscitate dying friends that it became normal for her.

Blue said she was overdosing almost daily, bringing herself to the brink of death in order to feel the drug’s effect. It became too expensive to keep returning to the hospital, and she had warrants out for her arrest.

She used an electric dog collar to shock herself back to life when she overdosed.

“My dog ran away a lot, but I’m alive.”

How they got better

Strickland, Blue and Hughes said they were using fentanyl to escape the problems in their lives.

“Instead of dealing with it like a normal person would, I wanted to escape it,” Strickland said. “It’s a complete escape from feelings.”

Blue said using drugs felt easier than handling her problems.

“It’s like an exhale,” she said. “It’s easier than a month of therapy.”

She said the fear of the withdrawal symptoms overpowered everything else in her mind.

“You’re already dead inside anyway. The thought of tomorrow without it is worse than dying,” she said.

Robin Ladner, executive director of LifeSource, a residential recovery program, knows the disastrous effects of fentanyl use.

“It destroys who they are,” she said. “They have dead eyes when they come in here, very lifeless, very sad, very without hope. Most of them don’t care if they live or die.

“In an ironic way, you’re using it to feel better, but it’s also killing you.”

The three women said going to jail can save lives by forcing users to detox.

“I had to detox in jail, and it was the worst detox I’ve ever been through,” Strickland said. “I was sick and hallucinating, and I literally thought I was going to die. That’s how intense it is.”

Withdrawals can last from 48 hours to a week, but some other symptoms can remain for months or even years. Recovery is a lifelong journey for most addicts.

“Being addicts, there’s a place in our brain that remembers good feelings, and we remember it forever,” Hughes said. “When we don’t have enough to do with ourselves, that little voice is like, ‘Hey, remember this?’ and then you get those crazy thoughts.”

Blue said boredom is the enemy of sobriety.

“As long as I’m busy, I’m good,” she said.

How it’s going now

For Strickland, Blue, and Hughes, this is a success story.

Strickland has been clean for a year.

Blue has been clean for 630 days.

Hughes has been clean for six months.

And other addicts can have success stories, too.

Strickland, Blue, and Hughes are now staff members at LifeSource, where they help people recovering from addiction get clean and stay clean.

Over the course of nine months, Ladner, Strickland, Blue, Hughes, and many more help recovering addicts get driver’s licenses, jobs, and whatever else they need to succeed. Recovering addicts stay at a group home with others going through the same struggle, providing them the stability Ladner says is one of the best methods to help a person stay sober.

Plus, after drug addiction has pushed away loved ones, Ladner said LifeSource offers a family for people who otherwise may not have one.

She said the program forces recovering addicts to face the problems that built up during active addiction, like bills and court costs.

“We hope that as they get clean and sober, they also develop skills they can use when they leave here to be independent and live a normal life,” Ladner said. “We’re trying to show them that life can be good, it can be happy, it can be full of joy. They don’t have to numb themselves.”

Strickland, Blue, and Hughes agree.

“My worst days now are better than my best days (during addiction),” Hughes said.

They urged people still actively using fentanyl to reach out and seek help.

“You don’t have to do it by yourself. There are so many people willing to help,” Strickland said.

She said even searching “detox” on the internet is a great first step. But they said jail, although intensely unpleasant, is an effective place to detox.

“If you have an active warrant, go to jail. It’s the best thing you can do,” Blue said.

But they all said there are only two choices — recovery or death.

“Whether you have one day clean, six months, a thousand days clean, it’s one more than the person out there dying,” Blue said. “Everybody’s eventually going to quit. It’s about if you live to talk about it.”